In her long awaited new novel, Drums of Autumn , Diana Gabaldon continues the remarkable story of Claire and Jamie Fraser that began with the classic Outlander , and its bestselling sequels, Dragonfly in Amber and Voyager. Cast ashore in the American colonies, the Frasers are faced with a bleak choice: return to a Scotland fallen into famine and poverty, or seize the risky chance of a new life in the New World--menaced by Claire's certain knowledge of the coming Revolution. Still, a highlander is born to risk--and so is a time-traveler. Their daughter, Brianna, is safe--they think--on the other side of a dangerous future; their lives are their own to venture as they will. With faith in themselves and in each other, they seek a new beginning among the exiled Scottish Highlanders of the Cape Fear, in the fertile river valleys of the Colony of North Carolina. Even in the New World, though, the Frasers find their hope of peace threatened from without and within; by the British Crown and by Jamie's aunt, Jocasta MacKenzie, last of the MacKenzies of Leoch. A hunger for freedom drives Jamie to a Highlander's only true refuge: the mountains. And here at last, with no challenge to their peace--save wild animals, Indians, and the threat of starvation--the Frasers establish a precarious foothold in the wilderness, secure in the knowledge that even war cannot invade their mountain sanctuary. But history spares no one, and when Brianna follows her mother into the past, not even the mountains can shelter a Highlander. For Brianna too has an urgent quest: not only to find the mother she has lost and the father she has never met, but to save them both from a future that only she can see.

It began at an ancient Scottish stone circle. There, a doorway, open to a select few, leads into the past--or the grave. Dr. Claire Randall survived the extraordinary passage, not once but twice. Her first trip swept her into the arm of Jamie Fraser, an eighteenth-century Scot whose love for her became a legend--a tale of tragic passion that ended with her return to the present to bear his child. Her second journey, two decades later, brought them together again in the American colonies. But Claire left someone behind in the twentieth century. Their daughter, Brianna. Now Brianna has made a disturbing discovery that sends her to the circle of stones and a terrifying leap into the unknown. In search of her mother and the father she has never met, she is risking her own future to try to change history...and to save their lives.